Spatial visualisation

Jan-Philipp Kolb

Tue Sep 08 20:58:58 2015

Hello world

Fra Mauro Map

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  • Drawing maps has a long history
  • Fra Mauro map (1450) is the greatest memorial of medieval cartography
  • Source: Wikipedia

Migrant route to Germany

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  • Used at BBC - get an overview of more maps like this here

The road to Europe

Source: The Independent

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Motivation

GDP per capita

Data source: World Development Indicators

GDP in German federal states

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GDP in German federal states

  • Map produced with R-package sp

  • Data source: Wikipedia

  • Polygon source: Global Administrative Areas (GADM)

More detailed - more interesting?

Social index - Proportion of social benefits recipients in Berlin

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Source: Tagesspiegel

Is the necessary data available?

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The spatial perspective…

  • … is relevant to get an overview of current developments

  • … is relevant to understand circumstances.

But how to get the adequate data?

  • Necessary data is often not available
  • More spatial visualisations are possible with web-data via Application Programming Interface (API)

A little quiz - which town is it?

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Background info

  • Map of photographic/traffic activity
  • Data from flickr used
  • Guess about picture taker’s mode of transportation
  • Time stamps and distance traveled between a user’s pictures
    • Black is walking (less than 7mph),
    • Red is bicycling or equivalent speed (less than 19mph),
    • Blue is motor vehicles on normal roads (less than 43mph);
    • Green is freeways or rapid transit.

New York

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Source: Eric Fischer

Two ideas combined

World Map Of Touristiness

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Source: Touristiness

Based on tourist pictures uploaded on panoramio

Locals and Tourists

  • Blue points on the map are pictures taken by locals (people who have taken pictures in this city dated over a range of a month or more).

  • Red points are pictures taken by tourists (people who seem to be a local of a different city and who took pictures in this city for less than a month).

  • Yellow points are pictures where it can’t be determined whether or not the photographer was a tourist (because they haven’t taken pictures anywhere for over a month).

Tourists and Locals

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Tracking Taxis Across Manhattan

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Source: The New York Times

Target / Motivation

The target is to visualize social aspects in maps.

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More examples

Spatial? - Motivation

  • Massive amounts of data … and growing!
  • Often freely accessible on the web (e.g. through APIs)
  • Often unstructured or semi-structured (e.g. web documents, news archives), often heterogeneous
  • Often not intended for geographic purposes, but implicitly containing geographic info implicitly (Web 2.0)
  • Often with little or no metadata

Examples

Organisation

Targets

I want to….

  • … show you examples of useful and less useful visualisations and applications.
  • … talk about the developments of maps/geography.
  • … clarify, why it is important for social sciences.
  • … show you how to produce your own maps/visualisations.
  • … tell you where you can find data.

Source

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Learning by doing

Source

Targets

Every participant should present his/her own maps.

  • Presentation of toolbox (R, Google API, OpenStreetMap etc.)
  • Learning by doing is very important

Background

Personal information

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University of Trier

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Source: Website with city maps

Erasmus - Univerity Lyon III

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Source: orangesmile

Source: Urban day

  link1 <- paste(graph.path,"MannheimMap.jpg",sep="")
# http://www.heimatundwelt.de/kartenansicht.xtp?artId=978-3-14-100260-7&stichwort=Quadrate&fs=1

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Gesis Mannheim

  link1 <- paste(graph.path,"GESISMannheim.png",sep="")

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Organisation Gesis

Five departments - Survey Design and Methodology

  • Monitoring Society and Social Change

  • Data Archive for the Social Sciences

  • Computational Social Science

  • Knowledge Technologies for the Social Sciences

Gesis

GESIS is:

  • Infrastructure Services for social sciences

  • over 250 employees at three sites (Mannheim, Cologne)

GESIS offers:

  • Consulting for research projects in all phases

  • Research based services

Tasks GESIS-Team Statistics:

Consulting and research on …

  • Planning of survey designs
  • Development of sample designs for face-to-face, written, and telephone-assisted surveys
  • Data analysis and visualisation

Your background?

  • Where do you come from?
  • What are you studying?
  • What are your research interests?
  • Which map would be interesting for you?

Tools for this course

Tools and services

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R programming language

R is a programming language and software environment for statistical computing and graphics. The R language is widely used among statisticians and data miners for developing statistical software and data analysis. Polls, surveys of data miners, and studies of scholarly literature databases show that R’s popularity has increased substantially in recent years.

Source: Wikipedia

Google maps

Google Maps is a desktop web mapping service developed by Google. It offers satellite imagery, street maps, 360° panoramic views of streets (Street View), real-time traffic conditions (Google Traffic), and route planning for traveling by foot, car, bicycle (in beta), or public transportation. Google Maps offers an API that allows maps to be embedded on third-party websites, and offers a locator for urban businesses and other organizations in numerous countries around the world.

Source: Wikipedia

Open Street Map

OpenStreetMap (OSM) is a collaborative project to create a free editable map of the world. Two major driving forces behind the establishment and growth of OSM have been restrictions on use or availability of map information across much of the world and the advent of inexpensive portable satellite navigation devices.

Source: Wikipedia

Github

GitHub is a Web-based Git repository hosting service, which offers all of the distributed revision control and source code management (SCM) functionality of Git as well as adding its own features. […] GitHub provides a Web-based graphical interface and desktop as well as mobile integration. It also provides access control and several collaboration features such as bug tracking, feature requests, task management, and wikis for every project.

Source: Wikipedia

Why use R

Why use R - It’s open source

  • It’s free
  • It’s open source
  • …

R is the leading tool for statistics, data analysis, and machine learning. It is more than a statistical package; itÂ’s a programming language, so you can create your own objects, functions, and packages.

Source: http://www.r-bloggers.com/why-use-r/

Why use R - many specific packages

A big number of (very specific) packages:

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Overview of available packages on CRAN

Why use R - overview of reasons

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Why use R - interfaces

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Why use R - GIS

R can be used as geographic information systems (GIS)

Why use R - visualisation

Because it is possible to create nice graphics:

Github stack

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Using Github

Github page

  • All relevant resources for this course will be available at:

https://github.com/Japhilko/GeoData

If you are interested in what is behind the scenes:

First steps in R

How to learn R

I will try to keep it simple and provide lots of resources.

Basic R

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Download and install R

  • Click here to download R for Windows.

  • R for other platforms (Linux and Mac OS) is available under:

http://mirrors.softliste.de/cran/

Rstudio

pic21 Source: R-programming